DÔJÔ

One can practise aikidô profitably anywhere. Places demarcated by more or less unspoilt nature are favourable: lakesides, riverbeds, beaches, meadows, woods, hills or mountains. Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of aikidô, retreated from time to time to practise on a farm far from Tokyo. Then, any moment is a good one, because each daily activity performed with the required attention certainly belongs to the sphere of aikidô. To such a point that one of the founder’s great pupils, Sensei Gôzô Shioda, considered a fruitful training to walk fast in a crowded street to get to the daily practice of aikidô, though avoiding physical contact with passers-by with meticulous certainty.

But at the end of a hard and often deceptive day, one goes to the perfect space in which to practise aikidô, one goes to the dôjô. This is the same name that Buddhism gives to the part of the monastery where religious exercises take place. The Sanskrit equivalent means "circle of awakening", that is, retreat that serves to attain that spiritual apex at times compared to a threatening unsheathed sword. For this, but not only this, reason, one enters the dôjô with a reverent heart, saluting the image of the founder affixed to one of the walls with a bow. This is a gesture of respect that favours installation of a receptive mentality, lucidly desired, that frees the practitioner from the call of the world, allowing him to thus concentrate on an extraordinary and almost unattainable goal: to re-acquire the mentality of the ancient warrior and discover the truth hidden in the martial arts. The experience is ineffable but as it proceeds it can be described in part and weakly with some words from the Buddhist tradition: "with a spirit solid, purified, clear, lucid, freed of dross, malleable, ductile, (the ascetic, the warrior) turns to the production of a body… provided with form, but hypersensitised, made of mind". Like the summit of a mountain this truth, which in principle is accessible to all, in reality is reached only by those few who are willing to pay the price in terms of self-discipline, perseverance and risk. Furthermore, not all arrive there at the same time, since there are those who do not feel the urgency and those whose will vacillates, gripped from time to time by doubts as to whether the search is worth the sacrifice required. This means that most limitations for the practice of aikidô are not physical and that therefore all "men and women, old and young" can put themselves to the test with this martial discipline.

Once within the dôjô one does not talk, one does not joke, one does not let oneself be distracted; all the attention of which one is capable is addressed intensely towards the arduous learning of techniques and use of exercises to fortify and strengthen the imagination. One works with patience and without repose to escape from the laziness of the habits of body and psyche and to forge a sort of sovereign indifference that allows every germ of teaching to grow and offer the mind its fruit. One immerses oneself in a world dominated by a quiet, silent, impersonal awareness, free of interests, in any case opposite to that of daily living. One trains oneself in a relaxed way, with pleasure, delight, joy. It is therefore evident that the dôjô has nothing in common with the sports gymnasium, where loads of satisfaction, of competitive ambitions and febrile pleasures are dug over and brought up again and again.

To continue, all the way, to nourish the mind with high thoughts and at the same time to drive out every useless churning over of thoughts at the end of a hard evening of training, the dôjô is cleaned with the greatest care by all those present. This is an activity which symbolically reminds all practitioners of the duty to purify one’s own mind and that urges them to act with resolution, as did Hercules when he cleaned the stables of King Augeas from the mountains of dirt and excrement that had accumulated there in thirty years of complete neglect. A necessary task that everyone must perform to create an interior dôjô - the real dôjô where one learns an absorption such that "in facing this world, he (the ascetic, the warrior) is without perception of the world … though possessing perception" and where one follows "a road that is as difficult to follow as that of the birds in the air".

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